On the morning after Election Day, George W. Bush held an unofficial lead of 1,784 votes in Florida, but to his campaign strategists, the margin felt perilously slim. They were right to worry. Within a week, recounts would erode Bush’s unofficial lead to just 300 votes.
With the presidency hanging on the outcome in Florida, the Bush team quickly grasped that their best hope of ensuring victory was the trove of ballots still arriving in the mail from Florida voters living abroad. Over the next 18 days, the Republicans mounted a legal and public-relations campaign to persuade canvassing boards in Bush strongholds to waive the state’s election laws when counting overseas absentee ballots.
Their goal was simple: to count the maximum number of overseas ballots in counties won by Bush, particularly those with a high concentration of military voters, while seeking to disqualify overseas ballots in counties won by Vice President Al Gore.
A six-month investigation by The New York Times of this chapter in the closest presidential election in American history shows that the Republican effort had a decided impact. Under intense pressure from the Republicans, Florida officials accepted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state election laws.
In an analysis of the 2,490 ballots from Americans living abroad that were counted as legal votes after Election Day, The Times found 680 questionable votes. Although it is not known for whom the flawed ballots were cast, four out of five were accepted in counties carried by Bush. Bush’s final margin in the official total was 537 votes.
The flawed votes included ballots without postmarks, ballots postmarked after the election, ballots without witness signatures, ballots mailed from towns and cities within the United States and even ballots from voters who voted twice. All would have been disqualified had the state’s election laws been strictly enforced.
The Republican push on absentee ballots became an effective counterweight to the Gore campaign’s push for manual recounts in mainly Democratic counties in southern Florida.
These overseas ballots–the only votes that could legally be received and counted after Election Day–were judged by markedly different standards, depending on where they were counted.
The unequal treatment of these ballots is at odds with statements by Bush campaign leaders and by the Florida secretary of state, Katherine Harris, that rules should be applied uniformly and certainly not changed in the middle of a contested election. It also conflicts with the equal protection guarantee that the U.S. Supreme Court invoked in December when it halted a statewide manual recount and effectively handed Florida to Bush.
`Americans have moved on’
After being told of the investigation’s findings, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said: “This election was decided by the voters of Florida a long time ago. And, the nation, the president and all but the most partisan Americans have moved on.”
No evidence of vote fraud by either party was found. In particular, while some voters admitted in interviews that they had cast illegal ballots after Election Day, the investigation found no support for the suspicions of Democrats that the Bush campaign had organized an effort to solicit late votes.
Rather, the Republicans poured their energy into the speedy delivery and liberal treatment of likely Bush ballots from abroad. In a Tallahassee “war room” within the offices of Harris, veteran Republican political consultants helped shape the post-election instructions to county canvassing boards. In Washington, senior Bush campaign officials urged the Pentagon to accelerate the collection and delivery of military ballots, and indeed ballots arrived more quickly than in previous elections. Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee helped the Bush campaign get private contact information for military voters.
Republicans provided their lawyers with a detailed playbook that included instructions on how to challenge likely Gore votes while fighting for the inclusion of likely Bush votes. In some counties where Gore was strong, Bush lawyers stood by silently while Gore lawyers challenged all overseas ballots, even likely Gore ballots.
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The effectiveness of the Republican effort is demonstrated by striking disparities in how different counties treated ballots with similar defects.
Disparities in counties
For instance, counties carried by Gore accepted 2 in 10 ballots that had no evidence they were mailed on or before Election Day. Counties carried by Bush accepted 6 in 10 of the same kinds of ballots. The Bush counties were four times as likely as the Gore counties to count ballots that lacked witness signatures and addresses.
The Times collected copies of virtually all the overseas ballot envelopes that arrived after Election Day and built a comprehensive database for statistical analysis. The Times also examined thousands of pages of election documents and canvassing board meeting transcripts and interviewed more than 300 voters in 43 countries. Because the ballots themselves are separated from the envelopes containing voter information, it is impossible to know whether the outcome of the election would have been different had the flawed ballot envelopes been treated consistently.
Dr. Gary King, a Harvard expert on voting patterns and statistical models, said that had the flawed ballots been discarded, there was no way to declare a winner with mathematical certainty. He said his best estimate was that Bush’s margin would have been cut to 245 votes. King estimated that there was only a slight chance that discarding the questionable ballots would have made Gore the winner.
Multiple flaws
Many of the 680 flawed ballots in the analysis of the overseas envelopes had multiple defects, so the total number of flaws exceeds the number of defective ballots. The following questionable ballots were found:
– 344 ballots with no evidence that they were cast on or before Election Day. They had late, illegible or missing postmarks.
– 183 ballots with U.S. postmarks.
– 96 ballots lacking the required signature or address of a witness.
– 169 ballots from voters who were not registered, who failed to sign the envelope or who had not requested a ballot. A request is required by federal law.
– 19 voters cast two ballots, both of which counted.
– 5 ballots received after the Nov. 17 deadline.
Canvassing board members struggled to strike a balance between counting as many votes as possible and safeguarding against fraud. Decisions were difficult, particularly with ballots that appeared to be from legitimate voters yet did not comply with the rules. In some cases, board members said they had used common sense and cited a Florida court decision that gave them some “latitude of judgment.” For example, the boards accepted 87 overseas ballots that arrived without a postmark a day or two after Election Day, judging that they most likely had been cast before Nov. 7.
Still, this benefit of the doubt was given to such ballots more than three times as often in counties carried by Bush, according to the Times database.
While parties quickly recognized the importance to Bush of the uncounted overseas ballots, especially those from military installations, the Democrats were preoccupied with their pursuit of manual recounts in several heavily Democratic counties. And their strategy for the absentee ballots, which consisted of challenging as many overseas ballots as possible, backfired after they were accused of disenfranchising men and women in uniform. The Republican effort on the absentees, by comparison, was methodical and unrelenting.
`Rules were bent’
Judge Anne Kaylor, chairwoman of the Polk County canvassing board, said the combination of Republican pressure and court rulings caused her board to count some ballots that probably would have been considered illegal in past years.
“I think the rules were bent,” said Kaylor, a Democrat. “Technically, they were not supposed to be accepted.”
Benjamin Ginsberg, national counsel to the Bush campaign, said, “We didn’t ask anybody to do anything that wasn’t in the law as it existed on Election Day.”
Florida’s certified election results, listed on the Florida Department of State’s Web site, show that the Republicans’ sense of urgency was justified. Although Bush appeared to hold a fluctuating lead throughout the 36 days of recounts, the Web site shows that without the overseas absentee ballots counted after Election Day, Gore would have won Florida by 202 votes, and thus the White House.
But no one knew that until the 36 days were over; by then, it was a historical footnote.